Short Drills: Microlearning Principles Improve Training Sessions

Firehouse, April 2023

When a drill in the fire service is developed, the person who designs the training session faces numerous pressures: competing demands for time, the crew wants the drill to be engaging and job-related, the firefighter or fire officer who conducts the drill wants the drill to improve the competency of the crew. Current understanding of human attention span and learning retention indicates that it might serve us well to shorten the individual training sessions and to increase their frequency.

Microlearning is a training concept by which a single element of material is presented alone as a small chunk of training. Microlearning sessions typically are designed as stand-alone sessions and last from 1–15 minutes. A common window for a microlearning session isn’t longer than 20 minutes, because people are overwhelmed when they are presented with somewhere in the range of five to nine facts. Sessions that last too long can result in a drop-off in retention. This is the reason that TED Talks videos by expert speakers are capped at 18 minutes.

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Short Drills: Microlearning Principles Improve Training Sessions

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